New ‘War of Worlds’: Capitalism vs. Planet Earth

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — There’s a new “War of the Worlds” raging, and this one is for real. Forget the pre–World War II radio hoax by Orson Welles. Flash forward to 2005 and the Steven Spielberg–Tom Cruise version? No, flash a little further. New technologies making Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message” dominate: new media, Twitter news, Google Glass, Big Data, Raymond Kurzweil’s “Singularity.” Hot news. Staccato. Immediate. Now.

Like the Orson Welles hoax, the stock-market benchmark’s all-time highs are a fantasy. But, for now, they control the medium. Yes, the majority, the global “collective unconscious” actually believes that what it’s hearing in the media is factual. And most believe it when they hear from the news anchors that 2013 was the best year since the dot-com rally of the late 1990s.

New York Times

New York Times story on the effect of Orson Welles’s hoax on listeners.

But imagine a “War of the Worlds”–style cut-in: “We interrupt this program ...” An alien invasion of Planet Earth, it says. Mushroom clouds. Panic ensues. And global retweeting. Once upon a time, in 1938, we believed the cut-in. And maybe we still would. Except that today’s “alien invasion” is capitalism, attacking, dominating, depleting world resources.

So imagine that cut-in, today, with the message that Wall Street is winning. Big Money is winning again. And you, Main Street investor, are the loser.

On an inflation-adjusted basis, in today’s bizarrely zero-sum economy, Wall Street actually lost trillions in retirement funds for Main Street America’s 95 million investors, while inflating the inequality gaps. Yes, from 2000 to 2013, Wall Street was actually underwater.

Still, most of us believe what the Big Money–Wall Street conspiracy broadcasts. It owns the medium and, thus, the message.

Fact 2: Global warming is as deadly as 400,000 A-bombs — every day

Next, imagine alerts rapidly streaming across your monitor. Big headline flashing: “Earth’s rate of global warming is 400,000 Hiroshima bombs a day.” Suddenly, fade to black. An eerie silence. You wonder: Is this our new reality? We’re in the dark.

Big Oil is fighting to keep that info off Big TV News. But the fact remains that the 400,000-daily-A-bombs headline is real. It was first posted on ThinkProgress.com and voiced by one of the world’s leading climate scientists, James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies from 1981 to 2013, in a 2012 TED Talk. But since Big Money rules today’s reality, even if the conspiracy loses a round, its perpetrators will invest heavily a comeback. They can’t afford to lose the “War of the Worlds.”

Fact 3: Just 90 companies trigger 63% of all global-warming pollution

This, from the Guardian, is a show stopper: “Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions: Chevron, Exxon and BP among companies most responsible for climate change since dawn of industrial age.” The opener hits harder: “We know who’s profiting from emissions—let’s bill them. Shell, BP, ExxonMobil and Chevron are some of the 90 entities discovered in a recently published research that contribute to most of the world’s emissions.”

Get it? Big Oil really is Big Polluter. “There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world,” observed Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute, who looked at methane and CO2 emissions from 1854 to 2010. “But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil, if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two.” In effect, “Heede’s work debunks the myth that everyone (and therefore no one) is responsible for climate change.” In truth, Big Oil is Planet Earth’s biggest enemy.

Fact 4: ‘Big TV News’ conspires with Big Oil climate-science deniers

Wonder why you rarely hear about climate change on television news? Here’s why: Network television is a major climate-science denier in cahoots with Big Oil and all other climate-science deniers. Yes, to survive, “Big TV News” relies upon hundreds of millions of dollars a year in television ads from Big Oil.

The facts: About a month ago, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the leading media watchdog group exposing bias in the news, released a new survey of national newscasts on CBS, NBC and ABC: “Extreme weather is big news. In the first nine months of 2013, there were 450 segments of 200 words or more that covered extreme weather: flooding, forest fires, tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes and heat waves.”

If you owned stocks or are an ideological climate-science denier, you loved 2013. And you’ll ignore ThinkProgress’s “nine major reasons climate change, and the carbon pollution that drives it, helped make 2013 one of the worst years in human history”:

Global CO2 levels hit 400 parts per million in 2013 for the first time in recorded history

It’s getting hotter, faster

A huge number of animals and plants face extinction

The world suffered deadly heat, drought and wildfires

Choking pollution shut down population centers

Countries suffer disasters but still commit to doing even less about emissions

Sea levels broke records in 2013, amplifying the effects of storms and floods

Much of the world is doubling down on fossil fuels

We are woefully undercounting methane emissions

But few in Big TV News will broadcast this message about how humans cause climate change. We prefer to hear “Wall Street’s best year since 1997!” Better yet, tell us that “2014 will be better” and give us predictions of more big returns. And, yes, that’s what our brains, and the world’s collective unconscious, will hear because the conspiracy has Big Money on its side to control the media and message. Till it’s too late.

Fact 6: Both worlds are losing this new ‘War of the Worlds’

This “War of the Worlds” redux pits capitalism against Planet Earth. But, unfortunately, in today’s “War of the Worlds,” the old conspiracy of Big Money–Big Oil–Big Government–Big TV Networks is beating the ragtag eco-activists fighting against global warming and climate change.

How? Every single day Big Oil and other climate-change deniers are spending megabucks to control your mind, to manipulate what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Remember, just 90 organizations with a war chest of trillions are spending billions every day to get you to ignore that rate of 400,000 A-bombs a day — and not only that. They want to control your mind, the collective unconscious. The real “War of the Worlds” is for the control of your mind. And everyone else’s.

Why? Any admission that humans are responsible for climate change would result in new carbon-emission restrictions and taxes. Until then, the impact of those 400,000 daily atomic bombs exploding on Planet Earth remains in force, and the Big Money–Big Oil–Big Government–Big TV Networks conspiracy will keep winning. And Planet Earth will keep losing, unfortunately.

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